This Year's Top-Grossing Films Instructed Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.

A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Alters Little

Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid